TOPIC: New Installation woes-- Need User Management to work

I just installed SuiteCRM on a cloud server. All appeared to go well. I had a previous instance running in my office and i exported most of all my records including users. In the last things todo was to reset passwords and email out to the users. There are only 10. I am finding that the Administrator cannot reset a password , nor create a new user. I can however delete a user. Also in the Password management None of the entries I make there are being saved. I have chmod -R 0777 the whole CRM directory and I have rebuilt roles and Quick repair and rebuild. There were no hiccups in the initial installation. I did export the users and import them from the old system, would that have affected this? Am I doomed to re-install without importing the users? HELP!

Wait, I could have installed a new instance and gotten a dump from the old one ? The old install was 7.8.5 and the new one is 7.10.10. That wouldn't help the fact that I cannot add new users or get the user password email templates to work would it?

ugh, This is not getting any better. So far I have reinstalled SuiteCRM 3 times from scratch. in the installation instructions it gives chmod examples on what directories need to be chmod to what priviledges. I run those from the command line without any errors. I check the directories and they are what they are supposed to be. When I run the insall.php it complains that they aren't writable. So I go back and chmod to 0777 just to get past that. At this point all I have working is "test Email" and one new user. When I try to setup Password Management for generating passwords and "Forgot Password" on the login, along with setting up password strength, etc. The save does nothing but kick me back to the admin page. Does everyone go through this headache? Sorry for the rant, getting frustrated.. I wanted to have this done two days ago

The permissions don't mean anything without the correct ownership. You're probably using www-data for the chown command, while your actual web server user is a different one. The instructions explain this. Permissions problems will ruin your experience in a hundred different ways... so let's try to get them right before anything else.

To explain your migration options - you can't migrate between different versions, but you can install an older version, so you can do a full database migration, and only then upgrade to the latest.

chown -R apache:apache . In my CRM directory That directory has apache as the user and group. Looking through other directories I find user:group as php-fpm No idea where that is coming from. The server is a cloud server running Centos 7.

You need to get a better grasp of your current web-server configuration... confirm exactly if Apache is running as "apache:apache" or as "php-fpm:php-fpm" (probably this last one, since it appears without your intervention).

Try listing the possible apache processes and figure it out:

sudo ps -ef | egrep '(httpd|apache2|apache|fpm)'

Another thing to check is if there is a second PHP engine running, normally this is coming from cron jobs. Try listing cron user by user:

sudo crontab -l -u apache

sudo crontab -l -u root

sudo crontab -l -u php-fpm

sudo crontab -l

This last one might show a different crontab, called the "system-wide" crontab, depending on which Linux you're running.

About the migration: I would always try a full migration before other options, because it would keep all my data, all my relationships, all users, etc. Only if I got into trouble with the full migration I would consider a more fragmented process moving data table by table, or with exports/imports.

No crontab listing for Apache
1 listing for root which is the one for the CRM
No other listings for Crontabs

In light of what you have told me regarding migrating the data, I think I will destroy this instance of this server, create a new one and install the version of SuiteCRM that I have working, do a dump of the db and then upgrade to the latest version. All after making sure it is working properly.

That looks like you have two web servers, or a web server with a php-fpm engine running under a different user. I doubt this is intentional, but it could be, if there are other groups set up for this to make sense. It sounds like a complicated web server set up.

If you go the route of setting up a new server, keep it simple, since you don't seem comfortable with this sort of sysadmin job. A straight-forward Ubuntu + LAMP stack will work great for you.

When migrating, normally you need to consider moving:

1. The full database
2. The custom directory (if you have customizations)
3. The upload directory, or the relevant parts of it (for stuff like attachments, photos, etc)
4. Relevant settings from php.ini, config.php and config_overrride.php

Occasionally there might be a few other things, but they're rare so I will assume you're not using them.

I thought I was comfortable enough to do this, didn't seem to be that hard in the past... The two web servers is beyond me. I created another Centos7 instance, but I think I will go the Ubuntu route as you suggest. As I get older, simplier is the way to go.

I did a Sql dump of the DB and uploaded it to the server.
Copied the
Custom, and upload directories entirely, chmod to the proper user;group
copied config.php and config_override.php files also doing a chmod

So I made progress here! I moved the DB to the new server and used the module uploader to bring over my customizations from th eold system. Changed the DB name in the Config.php and I have all my info. Then I upgraded to 7.10.10 No errors. It appears that I have all my relationships and all working. I even can send emails (at least test ones. The last thing I have is th eemail templates for password management. I did a chown www-data:www-data . All my permissions are a 0755. Think I am still looking at a permissions for the email templates?

I really appreciate your help here believe me. Anyway, I got everything working with the exception of the email templates in the Password Management. Actually, two out of the are missing and if I try to create a new one it won't save it. So if a user needs to have their password reset or does the request for password reset from the login we get the error that there is no template. I believe they went away AFTER I upgraded to 7.10.10. I set all permissions to 755 everywhere with the correct user:group. Can I just copy and paste them from the installation files of 7.8.5?